Who axed Woody for Wynton ?

[johnagrandy]

There's all sorts of crap all over the web insinuating such things, but no one ever states where, when, who, how, or exactly what.

I don't talk to too many professional jazz musicians, but I talk to a few every now and then, and no one's every told me any such stories.

A certain other famous jazz trumpeter (who is still with us), yes, there's lots of stories, with lots of details, names, places, dates, quotes, and some of it is outrageous almost unbelievable stuff.

But all you ever hear about Woody in this regard is allusions like "struggled with" , "substance-abuse induced bouts of illness" , "personal problems", etc. , that sound to me like someone who doesn't know anything threw them into his music review or little bio because he read something equally intangible somewhere else.

Who's to say one web biographer didn't exaggerate some second-hand or third-hand bits and pieces, and then a whole slew of other guys copied and extrapolated off of that ?

One thing I have read and heard from professional jazz trumpet artists is that they never heard Woody play badly. An off night musically: yes; but technically play the instrument at anything less than high proficiency: no. And this jibes with every recording , legit or bootleg , that I have.

The trumpet is an extremely difficult instrument, especially to play in tune on every note throughout all three of the major octaves. Woody had perfect pitch, yes, but that alone is not anywhere near enough to conquer the beast.

Until I hear something substantive , I tend to trust my own ears , and the ears of other brass men. If he was that messed up, then how is it that he never played badly ?

Edited September 27, 2005 by johnagrandy

[JSngry]

You, sir, have a lot to learn.

[John Tapscott]

I'm got to agree with Jim's take on this, and maybe even go a bit further.

I'm not trying to defend Columbia when I say this. But the fact is that in the time when fusion and disco were king, Columbia recorded and released FIVE albums of pretty straight-ahead, often fairly ambitious modern jazz albums by Shaw. Not bad.

Brubeck, Hubbard, Gordon, Davis and many others, some lesser lights and some greater lights, were all dumped by Columbia sooner or later.

The truth is that straight ahead jazz albums, even by the giants, and on widely distributed labels, rarely sell all that well. Even Wynton's sales at Columbia were apparently in the dumpster.

Nothing happened to Woody Shaw, label-wise, that hasn't happened to at least 90% of jazz musicians. Seems to me that when you sign on with a label like Columbia, you've got to be realistic. This is not a life-time deal by any means. It's like a professional athlete signing the best deal he can with a team for a certain period of time. It's going to come to an end. So do your best, and reap the benefits of it while you can.

[johnagrandy]

You, sir, have a lot to learn.

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Learn a lot from who ? From crap like this :

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:3udtD...y+shaw%22&hl=en

You know what I like about these boards, Jim ? I like the fact that there are intelligent , well-spoken , thoughtful , balanced people hanging out here.

I read the above-linked thread and immediately a number of thoughts occur to me:

1. Why is Branford using his high-profile website to publicly expose an ancient-history one-time incident that , in my eyes , has a justifiable explanation?

2. How many of those people can really play ? If they can't really talk, I doubt they can really listen. If they can't really listen , they can't really play.

3. Certain people don't even have the basic facts right (the guy who thinks Wood died in Amsterdam).

4. The whole atmosphere and attitude of the thread sounds high-schoolish. People who were still in diapers when Wood left us.

5. There are a lot of allusions to their own drug-use by the participants. In my experience, druggies love to believe everyone else is secretly on drugs to the same degree they are.

6. People extrapolate shaky information into even shakier conclusions (the guy who thinks Wood was mentally ill).

Finally, I would point out that in the context of what the challenges they faced in life you simply can not compare cats like Wynton and Branford to cats like Woody and Freddie.

W & B grew up in a reasonably well-to-do household in an era in which African-Americans were treated a lot better than in W & F's era; jazz education was on the rise; W & B started making good money very young, and, in Branford's case, huge rock-star money in his twenties; W & B were probably treated very well by everyone (industry people, club owners, audiences, etc) ...... etc.

.... basically, they were in the right place at the right time. And they both have this totally non-threatening choirboy look about them, which fit in perfectly what "certain people" wanted to see in jazz at the time.

[Dan Gould]

I don't talk to too many professional jazz musicians, but I talk to a few every now and then, and no one's every told me any such stories. 

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Well, Jim is a professional jazz musician and he is telling you such stories right here, right now.

It looks to me like we've got a very bad case of hero worship and anything that doesn't jibe with your view of your hero is rejected out of hand. But I'll bet you dollars to donuts that Jim has a better grasp of reality when it comes to Woody Shaw than you do.

[RDK]

Not to mention Branford, telling a first person account of his encounter with Woody - an account that jibes with what many others have said about Woody's let's-leave-it-as-eccentric personality. It didn't read to me that Branford was saying that to trash Woody, but someone did ask him if he had any stories to tell...

That said, I agree that many of the posters on that site (Branford's forum?) sound like idiots.

[RDK]

Beyond that, it really does no good to "blame" anyone for cutting Woody and replacing him, with Wynton or anyone else. It's the music business, and it all comes down to sales. Tapscott's right. We can praise Woody all we want to - and we should - for sticking to his artistic guns and not "selling out" when much of the jazz world was going pop or disco. But at the same time, we can't blame the record companies - Satan spawn or not - for cutting an artist whose artistic integrity gets in the way of his commercial acceptance. He did five albums for Columbia, which ain't too shabby...

[JSngry]

I read that thread you linked to, John, and it is indeed pathetic, including Branford's little fit of cry-baby whining. Branford caught a hurricane-force draft and it hurt his feelings. Boo f-in' hoo.

But you srill have a lot to learn.

Not the least of which is that you can be mightily coked up on a regular basis and still play your ass off on a regular basis, Believe it.

Also, there are many reasons why cats get high, and many of them are perfectly understandable. You already know that, it appears. Good.

But what you don't seem to yet know is that choosing to get high carries with it responsibilities and well as risks, and that if and when you fail to deal, it's not completely somebody else's fault. It's not at all unlike choosing to walk a tightrope in a windstorm - you might be the baddest tightrope walker who ever lived, and you may well get across that rope any number of times year after year, often against all odds. But when the wind finally does blow you off, you can't just say that it was all the wind's fault that you fell. Sorry.

You know what I'm tired of? Dogma. No matter how reality-based it is, it's the biggest obstacle to human progress around, afaic. And to say that Woody Shaw was completely destroyed because of "the system" is nothing but dogma. I really, really, don't need to be lectured about the frustrations of trying to survive as a creative musician in a hostile environment. You're preaching to the choir, dig? And I really, really, don't need to hear about how Woody overcoming all sorts of obstacles to become the titanic figure that he became is cause for celebration. More preaching to the choir. Nor do I need to hear how "the business" ate away at his psyche. It eats away at all of our psyches, even little local cats like myself. And I really, really, REALLY don't need to hear about how is it any wonder that a cat ends up getting high? No, it ain't no wonder, no even a minor one.

But at the very top of the list of things I really, really, REALLY, REALLY don't need to hear is all of the above (and more!) reduced to denial and excuses. It trivializes the reality in ways that I suspect you don't understand. If you did understand, you'd not fall prey to it as readily as you seem to do. You're reducing a very real, PROFOUND human tragedy to the level of Big Evil Destroying A Helpless Black Man.

Well get this, and get it right - Woody Shaw was anything but helpless. He was a strong man, and a Strong Black Man at that. But even the strongest of people have flaws. Woody's seemed to have been his erratic personality, which might well have been beyond his control. We now know a helluva lot more about chemical imbalances than we did as recently as 20 years ago, and all the anecdotal evidence I've seen/heard (by no means all of it as pathetic as the Branford bunch's) would point to the very good possibility that Woody had some sort of chemical imbalance.

A person with such biochemical tendencies is not at all well-served over the long term by using cocaine (and yes, Woody used cocaine. This I know. Deal with it). The results are eventually and inevitably devastating if the useage doesn't stop. And stopping is always, 100% of the time, a matter of either a person grasping, if only for a second, the horro of what is happening to them, and then deciding, at the most primal level, to make it stop or else dying. There are no other options. That is the reality, and all the dogma in the world won't change that.

Nobody with any little bit of sense claims that it's a simple matter of simply "choosing to quit". It's a helluva lot more complicated, a helluva lot harrowing, a helluva lot deeper than that. But the fact reaamins - that is the only way to get out of the trap short of dying. Confronting your darkest and innermost demons isn't enough - you then have to decide to conquer them. And that, my friend, is a motherfucker. Not everybody gets that far, and that is the real tragedy. All the rest of the bullshit is external. This is from within, and doing to yourself what others have tried and failed to do to you is about as dark a tragedy as I can think of.

Woody ran out of time, simple as that. Where I see both systemic blame and personal tragedy, you seem to see systemic blame alone. So go ahead and spout all the dogma you like. To the extent that it's useful in waking people up to the reality of what a sick world this is in so many ways, it's useful. Just know that that the stronger you push the Reality Of The General, the more you obfuscate the Final Inevitablity Of The Individual, and that's the reality that ultimately determines whether a cat lives or dies. No way around that.

I sincerely hope that the irony of this consequence is not lost on you. There are other "Woody Shaws" among us today, brilliant cats who are letting (yes, LETTING) the system destroy them. We're not talking people who have had a death-wish instilled in them from Day One, with little or no "counter-programming" available. That's another matter entirely. We're talking about people who have seen the light, often in blinding brilliance, yet find it difficult to hold on to it for any number of reasons.

You seem to want to offer them excuses/rationalisations/whatevers, a shoulder to cry on. I want to offer them whatever internal fortification it takes to keep their beautiful asses ALIVE, if that proves to be what they really, really want. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it ain't, and I respect either choice. But ultimately, it is going to their choice. But if you choose to live, you gotta stay strong.

Afaic, a fruitful survival is the ultimate revenge.

Edited September 27, 2005 by JSngry

[John Tapscott]

Wow! Agree 100%, but man,

[johnagrandy]

Nice diatribe, but maybe you chose the wrong guy to unload on ... ?

I could be wrong, but I don't believe you know some important aspects of the Woody story. I think you know quite a bit, but apparently you don't know the specific details of Wood's final years.

The man didn't end up the way he did in his final years directly because of sustained habitual drug abuse. He ended up that way because of an indirect consequence of drug use: a very specific and very unfortunate random outcome of drug use and society at-that-time's ability to assist in dealing with that condition.

It wouldn't have matterred if he got 100% clean or not. The man was living under a death sentence.

I've never been there and I don't think anyone who hasn't been there can really comment on Wood's ability or inability to save himself.

I also continue to doubt your information on Wood's level of use of coke or crack. I personally saw another famous trumpeter's crack-fueled explosions and meltdowns on more than one occasion, and I have heard nothing from anyone to indicate Wood ever acted in public in a manner consistent with abuse of that specific drug.

As far as assigning blame to society, the system, or specific people, that's all relative isn't it ? Wood certainly blamed certain people, and indirectly said so in interviews, and he knew all the specific details, while we do not.

As you said, he was a very strong man. A very strong man doesn't blame others unless the situation is massively unfair and has become intolerable and is doing severe damage to one's ability to continue creating and contributing day-to-day.

Wood also indirectly spoke in interviews about being a lifelong on-and-off junkie -- he wasn't trying to hide it.

His music tells me the man was the absolute rarest of geniuses of human communication. For whatever reasons, not many have figured this out. At least not now. I didn't figure it out myself until I went through some insanely rough times.

It could be generations before Wood is recognized as being on the same level as Trane. And consequently, until that time, not many are going to understand the man in the proper context.

If Trane had lived into 1968 and beyond then went into some horrible tailspin in which the agony came to the surface and was exposed for all to see, do you think he would be perceived in the same way that you perceive Wood ?

I highly doubt it.

[CJ Shearn]

interesting posts John and Jim. I don't have much to add other than each time I've listened to Wood, the consistency in the work is quite wonderful. BUT.......... Branford's rant which I read was really out of line. I enjoy quite a bit of Bran's music, but some of his opinions I feel have been laced with personal attacks, such as his account of Miles response to Wynton when he jumped uninvited on stage, citing Miles reaction as he knew his chops were shot and couldn't play anymore. And, Dr. George Butler, always thought what he did was a joke but the info on this thread definitely tells me that a lot of the crap music he produced was a result that he didn't know anything but cash money.

Edited September 28, 2005 by CJ Shearn

[Jim Alfredson]

Having been a professional musician since the age of 16 (and it goes back before that in other forms) I can say that musicians (and I'm generalizing here) that use drugs are most likely self-medicating.

Also, just because Woody didn't have a coke-freakout on stage doesn't mean he wasn't using and/or using heavily. Drugs affect different people differently.

Many musicians are, in general, highly unstable people. Most have "chemical imbalances", bipolar disorders, self-worth issues, problems with depression, etc. etc. It goes with the territory. A lot of them choose to help these problems by self-medicating.

It's always fascinated me to find out how many of these problems (and they aren't just exclusive to musicians, obviously) are genetic and how many are the result of our society's lack of support for the truly gifted and creative.

[Trumpet Guy]

I also continue to doubt your information on Wood's level of use of coke or crack. 

]

Do you need to hear more instances of Woody using? Can provide them if necessary...

I love Woody! Saw him at the Keystone Korner quite a few times---incredible!!

[Dan Gould]

I also continue to doubt your information on Wood's level of use of coke or crack. 

]

Do you need to hear more instances of Woody using? Can provide them if necessary...

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I don't think it would do any good at this point. This guy's got a major case of hero worship and it doesn't matter what he is told, even if it comes from professional musicians like yourself and Jim S.

[Eric]

I am going from memory, but seems Cuscuna had some interesting recollections about WS in the Mosaic box set booklet. Sad story ...

[RDK]

Effron's hero-worshipping was funnier...

[JSngry]

Nice diatribe...

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Thanks. Coming from a man who shows no small mastery of the form himself, that's quite a compliment!

It could be generations before Wood is recognized as being on the same level as Trane. 

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Please expound on this.

If Trane had lived into 1968 and beyond then went into some horrible tailspin in which the agony came to the surface and was exposed for all to see, do you think he would be perceived in the same way that you perceive Wood ?

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I don't know, man, how do you think I see Wood? If you think that it's as anything other than a truly great musician who met an equally truly tragic demise, you're wrong.